Pit stop in Shizuoka

I’ve heard a lot of good things about Shizuoka, a prefecture not too far from my own. But with my time in Japan winding down, and seriously high shinkansen (bullet train) ticket prices, I really didn’t think I would make it there.

However, as I mentioned in my last post about shibori, I recently went to Nagoya. Well, Shizuoka is in between Nagoya and my town. So on the way back, I decided to make a very short stop in Shizuoka.

Now I definitely didn’t give this prefecture the time it deserves, but as I said I’m working on limited time now. At this point, I’ve been to 19 out of 47 prefectures. Before I leave Japan I will be going to at least five more. So I feel pretty good about that. Of course I wish I could have made it to all 47 while I lived here, but that just didn’t happen. I would say that I do think it is possible to visit all of them in the course of living here for two years, it just wasn’t my priority at first (at first I was more interested in exploring Tokyo in-depth, since it is only 45 minutes away, so I spent most of my weekends there my first year living here).

Anyway, I was able to stop by Shizuoka and see a few things, including some ancient (replica) houses at Toro, visit Sunpu Castle, and try some unagi(grilled eel).

Now, if you are an incredibly dedicated fan of Friends, the word unagi should be familiar to you. If not here is a refresher:

So, obviously I was excited to try the eel that inspired this joke. I bought some and took it back to my house to have for dinner.

So…it was ok. But soooo expensive. That cost me about 1,700 yen, or around $17. And I ended up only being able to eat one of them. The flavor was just waaaay to rich for me.